Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
2025
DOI
10.1353/soh.2025.a966742
Publication Title
Journal of Southern History
Volume
91
Issue
3
Pages
551-552
Abstract
[Introduction] Since the mid-twentieth century, Atlanta has occupied a special place in American culture. From entertainment to industry to politics, Atlanta is one of the few places in America where what happens locally matters nationally. As a results, Atlanta has occupied an outsized space in African American, civil rights, and southern historical literature, leading to its own subgenre that can be called Atlanta studies. The historiography, including notable volumes such as Ronald H. Bayor's Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill, 1996), Kevin M. Krusc's White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2005), Tomiko Brown-Nagin's courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2011) William A. Link's Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering the Civil War's Aftermath (Chapel Hill, 2013), and Maurice J. Hobson's The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta (Chapel Hill, 2017), focuses on the city during distinct periods. With America's Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy, however, noted historian Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar attempts the monumental feat of writing a narrative synthesis- A complete history of Atlanta detailing its pre-Civil War birth, its place as the "Imperial City" for the Ku Klux Klan and the "City Too Busy to Hate" during the twilight of Jim Crow, and its role as "the Black Mecca," a major hub of Black southern repatriation, as well as an economic and political power, from 1970's to the present (pp.327, 372, 392). More plainly: Ogbar takes readers through a journey of a Deep South city with a racist legacy that has become a land of Canaan for Black Americans in the twenty-first century. This journey relies on Ogbar's implied thesis that Atlanta is where Black Americans best expressed their spirit of racial progress despite white supremacy, a theme he calls "Afro-self-determinism." (p. 4).
Rights
© 2025 Southern Historical Association. All rights reserved.
Included in accordance with publisher policy.
Original Publication Citation
Chiles, M. T. (2025). [Review of the book America's Black capital: How African Americans remade Atlanta in the shadow of the confederacy, by J. O. G. Ogbar]. Journal of Southern History, 91(3), 551-552. https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2025.a966742
Repository Citation
Chiles, Marvin T., "[Review of the book America's Black capital: How African Americans remade Atlanta in the shadow of the confederacy, by J. O. G. Ogbar]." (2025). History Faculty Publications. 74.
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/history_fac_pubs/74